One of the most idiotic things that Margaret Thatcher ever said is that “there is no alternative” or TINA, as it became known. More aimed at the “wets” in her own party than anyone else, it has become for some a statement of policy.

As David Wengrow pointed out at last year’s Hay Festival, talking about the excellent Dawn of Everything co-written with the late great David Graeber, of the 200,000 years of human history, the furthest back we can currently get back to and have some idea of how we might have lived is only around 30,000 years. Most of the other 170,000 years is a mystery to us. Have we always lived the way we do now? No, obviously not, even in the bit we do know about.

However the point the TINA people are making is that, once your society gets to a certain level of development and complexity, there is no alternative to the system of nation states operating within economies driven by globalised capital and all of the constraints that puts on any particular government’s policy options. So is that true?

Again apparently not. The Nebelivka Hypothesis exhibition at the Venice Biennale, which Forensic Architecture produced in partnership with David Wengrow, shows one example of a complex society which seemed to be constructed very differently:

Between the southern Bug and Dnieper rivers of central Ukraine, less than a metre below agricultural fields, geophysical surveys reveal the unsuspected legacy of 6,000-year-old settlements, similar in scale to the early cities of Mesopotamia. But these early Ukrainian cities are centre-less. Or rather, they are organised as concentric rings of domestic buildings, around a mysterious open space. No trace is found of temples, palaces, administration, rich burials, nor any other signs of centralised control or social stratification.

Even within the 30,000 years for which we have evidence, Graeber and Wengrow have shown how the archaeological evidence indicates that bureaucracy and hierarchy are not necessary in complex societies. Another prominent example of this, in addition to Nebelivka, is Poverty Point, in modern Louisiana. Constructed between 1700 and 1100 BCE by hunter gatherers, it had huge amphitheatres on a scale to match Athens but no temples or palaces.

There were other societies who flipped their social structure according to the seasons – for example, in the Great Plains in the main hunting seasons, when strict discipline was needed, a police force and hierarchy emerged, which then dissolved again when the need for it had passed.

Then there was Teotihuacan, a massive Aztec city of around 100,000 people where, until about 300, the colossal feats of engineering created pyramids and temples which had characterised the city up to that point stopped. Temples were desecrated and there was no new pyramid construction. Instead they started to build very high quality stone apartments for family units, with internal drainage, finely plastered floors and walls, providing comfortable accommodation for most of the city’s residents. Were they likely to be operating the same TINA system of the pyramid builders? It seems highly unlikely.

I had been struggling to imagine a society which flipped from one form of social organisation to another until I read The Gallows Pole by Benjamin Myers, about a Yorkshire valley in the 1760s. What both the TV adaptation (really a prequel of the book) by Shane Meadows and the book do in different but complementary ways is show how a society which had been working in one way might, under considerable pressure to survive, suddenly start operating in a completely different way with a totally different social hierarchy, switching from a rather ambivalent allegiance to King George III to a real devotion to the King David Hartley who had, at least temporarily, saved them from the starvation caused by the collapse of the wool market following the end of the Seven Years War in 1763.

The Cragg Vale Coiners’ attempts to evade detection led to a couple of murders before they were eventually hunted down by the authorities and that particular flipping of social organisation was snuffed out. How important it was that it was snuffed out is underlined by Christine Desan in the 18th century architecture of modern money, which describes this experimental time for money operating in the economy:

At the end of 17th century, the English resolved the debate over money they had conducted since the Restoration. For the first time, bank currency written against public debt circulated. It could be redeemed for silver or gold coin. That traditional medium—coin—would be reformed according to the notably non-traditional theory that it was a static amount of metal. An auxiliary kind of currency expressly based on the government’s own issue and promise of revenues, Exchequer bills, also began to circulate. The new order was a work in progress. In ways its authors only vaguely anticipated, the design was powerfully productive of modern capitalism.

So it seems that there are always alternatives.

Meanwhile one of the most pernicious examples of TINA is in response to the challenge of climate change. Chris Shaw’s appearance at the Dark Times Academy launch yesterday reminded me of this. Chris was talking about his book, Liberalism and the Challenge of Climate Change. In a wide ranging talk, he discussed the problem with the cult of the individual that liberalism has created getting in the way of collectivist approaches to shared problems like climate change. The book looks at how the philosophical and ideological challenge climate change poses to the legitimacy of free-market liberalism has been marginalised, closing off the possibility of imagining a different kind of future for humanity. Text book TINA.

And this is a particularly ridiculous use of TINA, when it is so obvious that there are alternatives to the relentless increase in habitat (including our own) and biodiversity destruction in lock-step with the ever-increasing and intoxicating levels of carbon we are filling the global atmosphere with. I discussed some of the arguments raging amongst those grappling with these challenges in my previous blog. But, rather than joining the discussion about the huge societal changes needed, we are instead told that fiscal rules are the priority for the current government and that any green new deal spending will need to wait until “later in the parliament”.

As Chancellor, Rachel Reeves has gone further, with a phrase which I really hope does not come to define this government:

If we cannot afford it, we cannot do it.

This appears to be a deliberate, almost Animal-Farm-level, reversal of the famous quote from Keynes (from a 1942 talk for the BBC – transcript sourced from here):

Let us not submit to the vile doctrine of the nineteenth century that every enterprise must justify itself in pounds, shillings and pence of cash income … Why should we not add in every substantial city the dignity of an ancient university or a European capital … an ample theater, a concert hall, a dance hall, a gallery, cafes, and so forth. Assuredly we can afford this and so much more. Anything we can actually do, we can afford. … We are immeasurably richer than our predecessors. Is it not evident that some sophistry, some fallacy, governs our collective action if we are forced to be so much meaner than they in the embellishments of life? …

Yet these must be only the trimmings on the more solid, urgent and necessary outgoings on housing the people, on reconstructing industry and transport and on replanning the environment of our daily life. Not only shall we come to possess these excellent things. With a big programme carried out at a regulated pace we can hope to keep employment good for many years to come. We shall, in fact, have built our New Jerusalem out of the labour which in our former vain folly we were keeping unused and unhappy in enforced idleness.

If we really are the complex sophisticated developed society that we think we are, then it’s time to put a tiara on Tina and start seriously discussing alternative approaches to all our problems.